The Agency - Helping you find PVE content in New Eden

2017-10-23 - By Team Psycho Sisters - EVE dev-blogs

Greetings capsuleers,

We're coming up on EVE Online's fifteenth anniversary and that means fifteen years of content being added to the game. With so much to do in New Eden it is sometimes very difficult to find exactly what you're looking for. In fact, for new players it can be overwhelming.

To help you narrow down your content search within EVE’s various gameplay systems, we've come up with a feature so you can view lots of content in one place. Introducing The Agency

But don’t we already have a feature called The Agency?

We do, and it will be assimilated to this new and improved version of The Agency so that we have one UI that will be a hub for all PVE content. Industry, Planetary Interaction and other “non versus” gameplay will still be housed in their particular UIs.

Supported Content

The new version of The Agency connects you to all the PVE content in the game and provides you with access to this content in a manner that should fit any play style or time allowance. For the initial release coming in the October 24th Lifeblood expansion, the following content will be included:

I am sure some of you are reading this list thinking that we are killing exploration by including Anomalies and Signatures. Worry not, these items will only appear for the system that you are currently in and you will still have to scan down signatures to know exactly what they are. Once you have scanned them they will appear in your list of available cards.

We have our sights set on adding the following systems to the Agency in the future:

Incursions

Landmarks

Factional Warfare

Escalations from exploration sites

Filtering The Agency

You can imagine with 15 years of EVE content, it all amounts to A LOT of cards for players to sift through! We want you to find content that's both accessible and interesting to you, but with all this possible content and information available, how will you be able to find the content you want and make sense of The Agency?

We will be providing some filters so you can discover the content you want to run and where you want to run it. The goal here is to give enough control over your search without burdening you with too much clicking.

On release we will have two top level, user configurable filters to narrow down to the content you want. The first filter is "Range", which lets you to select your current system, 2 jumps, 5 jumps, 10 jumps or any distance to indicate the maximum distance you're willing to travel.

The second filter is “Content Type”, which breaks down in the following way:

Suggested - This will be a mix of all the available content to you

Combat - This will be a mix of all available combat content, such as Security Agents and combat sites

Mining - A mix of all available mining content, such as Mining Agents and Asteroid Belts

Specify - One specific type of content. In some cases, this comes with content type specific filtering, such as, faction, corp, level and type for agents, to give players more precise control:

Agents

Sites

Asteroid Belts

Signatures

Epic Arc Agents

At this point, the Agency will provide a shortlist of the most suitable content based on the user selected filters, location, standings, skillpoints and other relevant parameters. The details of how we come up with the shortlist would probably require a blog of its own, but the mantra is that we always give you the best, nearest content you can actually participate in right now, while avoiding redundant choice.

Interacting with The Agency

Once you have filtered down to the content you want, how do you go about finding out more information?

Each piece of content is going to have a basic card that will appear as a list on the left of the window.

Clicking on the basic card will open an expanded card offering more details about the content.

With these expanded cards we are going to try and expose all the relevant information that will be required for participation in the content and the possible rewards that can be received. The expanded card should be clearly explaining what the content is, how to participate if you cannot already (ship restrictions), what progression mechanics it ties into (standings), and how to get to it based on your current location (Set Destination, Warp to).

Some examples of extra information that will be included:

We will show you the potential asteroids that can appear Asteroid Belts, Ore Sites, and Ice Belts.

The hostiles that may appear in the sites. We are also looking at including NPC damage types in future iterations of The Agency so that should free up some space in all your bios.

If any content requires special modules to participate, we would like to let you know this in advance

This is just the first iteration of The (new) Agency, so we look forward to hearing your feedback on what other filters, content or information you would like to see included.